The Famous People Who Died on Halloween

I have always thought something was unsettling about famous people dying on Halloween. It is already the one night of the year when ghosts, séances and the dead become part of the fun, so Harry Houdini’s place in the story feels almost too perfect.

Houdini didn’t just know how to escape handcuffs. He knew how to get people talking about him. Rather than simply buying advertising, he turned newspapers into part of the act. In 1904, London’s Daily Mirror challenged him to escape a specially made pair of handcuffs that had been promoted as virtually impossible to pick. The newspaper built up the challenge; 4,000 people packed London’s Hippodrome and Houdini finally emerged free after an hour and ten minutes. The Mirror got a spectacular story, and Houdini got exactly what he wanted: more Houdini.

That was the real trick. He understood that an escape was only half the show. The other half was getting everyone to tell somebody about it.

Houdini died on October 31, 1926. He was 52, and this time there was no escape. He died in Detroit from peritonitis following a ruptured appendix, making Halloween an especially eerie ending for a man whose entire career revolved around cheating death.

Houdini and his wife, Bess, had made a pact that whoever died first would try to communicate with the other from beyond the grave. They even created a secret code. It began with “Rosabelle” and, when decoded, spelled “Believe.” After Houdini died, Bess held séances every Halloween for ten years, hoping he would send the message. In 1936, on the tenth anniversary of his death, she held the final séance and concluded that Houdini had not come through.

Houdini had once spent 90 minutes underwater inside an airtight bronze coffin. The man who could escape locked boxes, chains and coffins couldn’t escape a ruptured appendix. If I were a betting man on the afterlife, I’d put all my chips on Houdini. He and Bess had made one final pact: whoever died first would try to come back from the dead. But after 100 years, I think the house has officially collected.

Houdini wasn’t the only famous name to have October 31 written into his final chapter. River Phoenix died on Halloween in 1993 at just 23 after collapsing outside the Viper Room in West Hollywood. On that same date, Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini also died in 1993, while former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984.

There is something strange about putting those names together. Houdini, the master showman; Phoenix, a young actor whose career was cut tragically short; Fellini, one of cinema’s great filmmakers; and Gandhi, one of India’s most consequential political figures. Their lives had almost nothing in common, yet Halloween became the date that connected them.

Maybe that is why Houdini remains the perfect Halloween story. He spent his life convincing audiences that there was always a way out, then made a secret pact with his wife to prove he could escape death itself. Bess waited ten years for the signal, but it never came, and after a century, the greatest escape artist of them all still hasn’t returned. For once, Houdini stayed gone.